August 2009 - Posts
In today’s post, I’m going to show an interesting technique to solve a problem and then I will tear it to pieces and explain why it is actually useless. I believe that negative results should also be published so that we can save other people from wasting time trying the same thing. So here goes… A few days ago, a post on Ajaxian proposed a new version of a somewhat old technique to implement querySelectorAll on old versions of IE, using the browser’s native CSS engine. That sounds like a great idea at first, and the hack is quite clever. The idea is to dynamically add a CSS rule to the document that has the selector that you want to evaluate, and an expression that adds the matched elements to a global array. When I read this, it reminded me...
Corrina , head UX-designer for Silverlight, just posted some cool new themes for the Silverlight 3 Navigation Application and, better yet, some ideas on how to tweak the ones that are out there to make them match your specific scenario. I really love where this is going… Hopefully we will eventually get to the powerpoint like theme support… My favorite new one is Candy Store… Enjoy ! Read More...
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One of the challenging aspects of working with TFS as your source control system is very unfortunately the installation of the client software. Over the past few years, I’ve been managing a number of small and large projects on CodePlex, and while the Subversion bridge has provided a much needed simple choice of client software, TFS remains its native protocol , which makes it still very much relevant to people who do a lot of work there. But as I said, installing the client software may be challenging . The first and main problem here is that Team Explorer, while free, comes in a very unfriendly format: an ISO image of the DVD. I asked the team why they made that weird and less than optimal choice, and apparently there are some technical reasons...
This is the third in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post discusses VS 2010’s enhanced multi-targeting support – which allows you to use and target multiple versions of .NET. We did significant architectural work in the VS 2010 release to enable a number of new multi-targeting features, and provide a much better experience. Understanding Side-by-Side VS 2010 can be installed “side by side” with previous versions of Visual Studio. What this means is that you can install it on the same machine as VS 2008/VS 2005/VS 2003 – and use all of the versions at the same time if you’d like. .NET 4.0 can also be installed “side by side” with previous versions of .NET on the same machine. ...
David Yack dropped by my office today and we had a good chat about the direction of Silverlight and RIA Services. David has some great feedback for us from several real apps he has been working on. He also dropped off a copy of his book Silverlight 3 Jumpstart . While I haven’t read it in detail yet, I love that the book is small and focused, giving readers just what they need to get started with Silverlight. He includes a teaser on RIA Services as well, I hope to see even more on that in the future. ;-) Enjoy! Read More...
Time for a brief but fun post... some time back Tim Heuer posted the Silverlight 3 bouncing plane gratuitous demo . Click an element, and the nearest corner would bounce backwards and forwards as it comes back to rest. Tim had the code to setup the storyboards, and handle the mouse interaction in code-behind. I look at it, and immediately see a reusable component (even if it is a gratuitous one), or more specifically a behavior, that encapsulates all the logic, and can be attached declaratively in XAML to one or more elements simply without needing any code-behind logic. So I created one such behavior. I used this behavior in my TwitterBug sample at TechEd recently, and thought it could use a dedicated blog post. :-) Here is a screenshot, which...
I think today is an appropriate time to write this post, as Rob Conery is leaving Microsoft tomorrow . “Who?”, you might ask. Rob is the author of the excellent MVC Storefront and Kona series where he explored the challenges in building an MVC-bound storefront application. I’ve been working with Rob for a few months on the continuation of that, which will be the subject of this post. This is challenging for a number of reasons. First, Rob’s are large shoes to fill (he’s a 12, I’m an 11). That’s fine, I’m just going to do things my way and try to have as much fun as possible (and communicate that if I can). Second, the focus of the application has changed and that is a much more important challenge. Rob built this as a learning tool, as much...
This is the second in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post is about another small, but I think nice, change coming with VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4 when you create new ASP.NET Web projects – which is the ability to create both “Empty projects” as well as to create projects that already have some layout and common functionality included in them, and which can help you get started when building a new application. Creating New Projects When you use the File->New Project or File->New Web Site menu commands within VS 2010, you’ll see a “New Project” dialog like below that allows you to filter by language and application type and select different project templates to use when creating new projects...
In my last post, I described BLinq, or LINQ to Bing , an API that allows you use LINQ to access the Bing search results (ok, so perhaps BLinq was not the best of names, given prior art on that name ... but anyway). I also alluded to .NET RIA Services integration, which I'll cover in this installment. In fact, IQueryable and the LINQ pattern lie at the very heart of .NET RIA Services, in allowing developers to access data in a consistent manner not just on client or server but across client and server, and enabling code to compose queries naturally. If you haven't read the intro post, please take the few minutes to check out the LINQ snippets to get a general sense before continuing on. You might use Bing in your rich internet application...
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